After the Fire
by LilLolaBlue
Summary: Hermione’s come undone, in her last year at the Merlin School, a mad mistress of the occult in a mouldy tower. No one’s heard from her for a year. Can she just return to Hogwarts as Snape’s apprentice? Or will there be hell to pay? HP & Naked Lunch AU
1. She's So Cold

**AFTER THE FIRE**

_Author's Note: This story takes place after the events of 7__th__ year in my Harry Potter AU. So, if you haven't fully read Harry Potter and the Naked Lunch for Two, and you intend to, there will be spoilers._

**Chapter One: She's So Cold**

**Merlin School, Cambridge, England, 2000**

**I: Granger**

With an absent look on her face, buttoned into her Master Magus of the Third Degree in the Arts frock coat, her old Gryffindor scarf wound around her neck, Hermione Granger made her way quickly through the hallways of the Merlin School, en-route to her room.

She paused only to brace herself against the wall, and cough, quite unhealthily, spitting something nasty into a disreputable wad of tattered Kleenexes, which she jammed back into her pocket.

The room which Hermione had occupied since she began classes five years before was utterly abysmal.

It was tiny, damp, sparse and cheerless.

Not to mention, grey, mouldy, dismal and smelly.

The bed was too small, and it was uncomfortable.

The hearth was too small, so that even with a fire blazing you were too cold in the damp winters, and the windows were so tiny that you sweltered through hot weather.

The chair at the table was uncomfortable, there was never enough light, and in the bathroom there was no tub, only a tiny closet of a shower stall.

The room was damp and cold in winter and fall, and hot and humid in spring and summer, and it wasn't so much that Hermione's hatred of it had faded with the years, she just got used to it.

In her first 2 and a half years at the Merlin School, Hermione completed her degree in DADA, and now, in the dead of winter, she was one semester away from completing her education as a Potions Mistress.

She already had a position lined up at Hogwarts, apprentice to Snape.

Snape.

It had been awhile since she had seen him, but mot since she had thought about him.

She thought about him every night, and he had a tendency to haunt her dreams, but in the best possible way.

Actually, it had been awhile since she had seen anybody, she just somehow couldn't get the time.

She hadn't been home to see her parents in four months, and she hadn't seen Ron for six. Ginny attended the Merlin School with her, but for the past two years they had few classes together and she only saw Ginny maybe once a week, and on occasion Harry was with her.

Not like Hermione went places with them.

She'd seen them for a hurried lunch, absently, gobbling down whatever, nodding absently at her friends' words, her mind already on her next class.

Commonly, her only company was Crookshanks, and the Granger family house-elf, Winky, who did her best to make Hermione's Spartan life of studying, working, despairing, cursing existence, studying, bitterness, working, anxiety, and more studying liveable.

Hermione shuddered in the cold dampness, and decided she had better owl Snape, just so he knew she was still alive.

_Snape,_

_ Thanks for the apprenticeship. Been working very hard for so long, looking forward _

_ to graduation and returning to Hogwarts. Have another horrible cold, the latest in a succession of horrible colds since the end of September. Scourgify yourself after you read this. Bloody damp, here. Probably chronic sinusitis or bronchitis brought on by this awful place. So glad to be returning to Hogwarts. _

_ Granger. _

She started thinking about the last time she and Sev had been together.

They were at his house, in West Derby, and he was in a foul mood, because Liverpool had lost to Glasgow in Quidditch.

She hadn't cared, because the only thing she had to really look forward to, slaving away at the Merlin School, and living in her horrid little dorm room was coming home for weekends, and spending Friday and Saturday nights with him.

She never had him over to her dorm room; it would be too distracting.

It was wintertime, and the house was old and it was a little chilly in the bedroom, so Sev had the hearth going, and after they had made love, they were sitting up in bed, eating Mallowmars, and he was complaining about how being a war hero had only brought him closer to the world full of naff punters, morons, idiots, fucking morons and idiots, and other people he never wanted to meet.

Hermione complained about how much work she had to do, and how awful her rooms were, and how she sometimes wished she had gone to Merseyside Magical with Harry and Ron, and how even though she and Ginny went to the same school, they hardly ever saw each other.

That was it; they had fallen asleep, and Hermione went to her parents' house in Woolton on Sunday, and then back to the Merlin School on Monday morning.

But she had been home, in Liverpool, and warm, and happy, and with Snape, manky old Scouser git that he was.

Now, it seemed like she'd been in heaven.

She couldn't get home for a month, she had so much work to do, and then she wanted to get a jump on the next projects that were due, and before she knew it, six months had gone by, and she was offered a summer position to travel to the Himalayas with one of her professors, and then it was back to school.

This last year of college, gods, she worked like a demon.

The only person she saw with any regularity was a surly, unpopular brute of a wizard who was in all of her classes.

Roger was older than her by about ten years, he was a Slytherin and a reformed Death Eater, a wiry, tall, thin, sandy-haired Cockney from East London.

He was a bit of a drunk, and he had been to Azkaban, where he had collected a number of freakish jailhouse tattoos, but he was sharp, and had a very sick sense of humour, and he wasn't the sloshy type or the marrying kind.

Living just down the hall, Roger was both expedient and convenient, as an occasionally study partner or for the odd shag, and as long as his perennial drunkenness and his Jack-the-Lad personality didn't bother her, Hermione's Everlasting-Know-It-All bit and her constant sneezing, coughing, and honking didn't bother him.

Thinking about it, Hermione realised just how depressing, squalid and horrid her life had become, and she decided that the end of her days at the Merlin School couldn't come too soon.

**West Darby, Liverpool, Home of Severus Snape, 2000**

**II: Snape**

Snape hadn't expected to hear from Hermione while she was in Tibet, but when he didn't hear from her for another three months, he became puzzled.

When he heard that she had been running around with Roger Davies, one of his Slytherins, at the Merlin School, he was furious.

They had agreed to have an open relationship, but not to have any secret partners.

Well, if that was the way Granger wanted it, let her have the Cockney lout.

Then, after the passing of another three months, he got a weighty owl from Hermione, formally requesting that he accept her as his apprentice, both in Potions and DADA.

At the end of the voluminous parchment was a hastily scribbled personal note.

_Snape,_

_ Sorry we haven't spoken lately. Very busy. Been sick for a long time. Still best to scourgify your hands after touching this. Haven't even seen parents. Tell Mum and Da I'm still alive. Harry and Ginny, too. Have her talk to Ron. So miserable and sick and tired. Missing everybody. You especially. _

_ Granger_

Coming from Granger, that was a cross between a tender love letter and a cry for help.

Upon returning home from Hogwarts that night, Snape went to Woolton, and found that John and Olive Granger were beside themselves with worry.

Snape promised them he'd do something, but he wasn't sure what that was, yet.

Hermione hadn't been behaving a bit oddly since she started college.

For example, after his 7th year at Hogwarts, Harry immediately moved in with Snape at the latter's new house on the same block as the Snape-Prince house in West Darby.

He had become a born-again Scouser, enrolled in Merseyside Magical, and was determined to make up for as much lost time as he could with his father.

Even though Ginny was at the Merlin School, she decided she didn't like their rules about underclass students living in austerity, so she often apparated to Snape's, and spent her evenings and nights with Harry.

If anybody didn't like it, they sure as hell weren't going to remonstrate with the Killer Quuen over it.

Hermione, always by the book, came around on Fridays and Saturdays and went home to her parents on Sundays.

Then, she quit showing up at all.

Snape decided to talk to his son's girl and his former lieutenant Ginny Weasley, one night over dinner.

He discovered them snickering over some romance novel that some dizzy witch had written about him.

Harry was reading aloud.

"…Snape was a supernaturally handsome man, with fine, pale skin, and lustrous black hair. His lips were full, in the shape of a Cupid's bow, but stern and manly underneath the straight nose that lorded over them. He was tall, and well-formed, with long, smooth limbs and a smooth, white chest, a handsome man, delicate, yet somehow strong..."

At the entrance into the room of actual Snape, a fairly hairy, raw-boned, heavily- tattooed bruiser of a Scouser, scowling down his great beaklike neb with shark-black eyes, some stubble on his pointy-chinned long jaw, they both began to laugh.

Scowling even more mightily, Snape drew his wand and zapped the book into ashes.

"Miss Weasley, if you really want to know what it's like to have me, I'll oblige you. And you, you little bastard, I'll stupefy you and make you watch!" Snape snapped.

"Oooo, there's a kick I ain't tried." Ginny joked.

Harry looked somewhat dismayed.

"Don't give me that look, Potter. What you have, you got from me, didn't you? Now, Weasley, let's discuss the fucking elephant in the living room we've been throwing a doily over. Tell me about Granger."

"I thought you were off her, Snape." Ginny replied.

"Oh, Da's never off our Hermione for long." Harry quipped.

"Well, it would do her good, wouldn't it? Maybe that's' what she needs to get her mind working again, a good hard shag, and don't spare the 'orses. You'll need to set her right, somehow, Snape, because I've tried and Harry has, and she just owls Ron. Because she's gone potty. Maybe the war's catching up to her at last, or maybe the mould and the damp have seeped into her brains this past year, because she's right round the twist. I mean it. She's never bothered to do any of the magical alterations to her room that students were permitted after their austere first year; she probably doesn't even know that they're possible. Worse for her, the rooms are made so that they get nastier and nastier as time goes on, to remind you that you can change' em. That fuckin' 'ole she moulders in must be a nightmare by now. But, at any rate, that wouldn't help Hermione. She lives in that fucking lab and in the library. That little shit'ole of a room she occasionally crouches in, like some damned thing, in a dismal, damp, dreary prison is just the place she goes for the odd hour or three of sleep every night before she wakes up, beats herself about the head wif a hammer, or somethin', and lashes herself to the ship's wheel, again."

"What about Roger Davies?" Snape asked.

Harry looked shocked.

"Roger Davies? You mean Rog the Dodger? That sad bastard, he used to live at the Horntail's Nest. He became a Death Eater on a drunken whim and spent the whole war glued to a barstool. Or shagging some or the other disreputable bints and laughing about how he didn't remember it happening and even Voldemort didn't want him. Loved to fight. A real Jack-the-Lad type. Every once in awahile, he'd take a side-trip to Azkaban for some petty crime, but when he was out, he was back on his barstool. We called him Rog the Dodger because he managed to always duck out of everything. How did he get into the Merlin School?" Harry asked.

"Probably that Death Eater rehabilitation thing. Rog was never dumb, just drunk and irresponsible. I wouldn't worry about him, Snape. He's just Hermione's room-temperature dildo. I mean, even in the state she's in, she still fancies her chances, sometimes. And Rog's room is close by hers, they're in most of the same classes, and he's just a convenience for when she needs a shag or a moment of human companionship. It's really pathetic, you know. She hardy even speaks to me. I see her running up and down the stairs, gearing up for her 19th Nervous Breakdown, and every time she looks a little tireder, and a littler thinner. Looks right through me, sometimes."

With that, Ginny continued to shovel her dinner into her mouth.

Snape and Harry both gave her incredulous looks.

"What?" Ginny asked

"What do you mean, what?" Harry insisted, furious.

"What Harry means, Weasley, is that it really should have occurred to you to, oh, let me think, fucking DO something about one of your best friends since you were Tom Riddle's little Lolita jailbait girlfriend degenerating into a state of mental and physical exhaustion! Have you got rocks in your head, Weasley? Or maybe you've taken a few too many Bludgers to it! Or perhaps having your tank topped off by no less than three wizards a week, which, I admit, is conservative for you, has addled your mind, completely!" Snape roared.

"What he said!" Harry found himself adding, even though he was one of the wizards in question.

Ginny just laughed.

"I'm not her keeper, am I? And you know Hermione. You can't talk to her once she's made up her mind. Well, you can, but good luck for any of the rest of us. She's a big girl, she's been through worse, she'll come through this, and there's not a fucking thing anyone can do about it, is there? And you lot haven't got much room to talk when it comes to virtue. Harry's fucked every witch of our age, and Snape, you've fucked all their Mums. And I dare say there's been some overlap. Not to mention I must add, at least I'm not some fucking junkie gutter drunk who goes to bed at night dreaming of his last drink and his last fix. Snape, I don't know if you yell out for Hell's Horntail and Purple Doom when you blow your load, but sometimes Harry does. Pass the potatoes, then." She replied.

Snape arched his eyebrow.

"It's a fair cop." He said, and resumed eating.

Harry passed Ginny the potatoes.

After dinner, Snape went down to his lab, which was constructed in a special concrete bunker he'd had installed through Wizarding methods and at great expense.

It helped him to work as he thought.

On one hand, it was only another month until the end of the fall semester, and Hermione's graduation. Snape knew that Hermione would never forgive him if he did anything that would result in her missing her matriculation.

On the other hand, she could be seriously ill.

The book that Snape had atomised was hardly the only piece of Snapean fiction that Harry and Ginny had amassed, and as soon as they heard his footfalls on the stairs approaching breakfast, Ginny began to read from a book that had quite a different tone.

"…Lorelei was very aware of the fact that Snape was an ugly man, ugly and ruthless, but there was something in the Potions' Master's smooth cold-bloodedness that was compelling and manly. She had never been with a grown man, before, only boys, and in such close proximity to the old sinner as he loosed the front of his robe, showing a broad but thin chest marred with black hair and scars, even his brusquely spoken suggestion that she lift her skirt was oddly arousing. Lorelei hadn't moved fast enough for him, so he pushed her skirt over her thighs with a large, sure, long-fingered hand, which he then dipped down the front of her panties. The old sinner knew just where to press and insinuate his callused fingertips, and Lorelei gasped, for which she was rewarded by an evil, lusty smile…"

"Well, that's slightly less insulting." Snape quipped.

Ginny looked up from the book, and she and Harry couldn't help but notice that he wasn't just dressed in his teaching robes, but in his scariest possible set of teaching robes, the formal ones that stopped at the elbow and dipped in the front to show his Master Magus tattoos, and otherwise swooped and hung in such a way that they made him look like a bat or a demon, a Dark Wizard of ill-repute that you'd have to be mad to run afoul of.

Almost instinctively, they quieted down, and looked into their cereal bowls as if points were about to be taken from Gryffindor.

"You look as though you're about to call me Professor. Good. Because I am going to the Merlin School today. To sort Granger out." Snape said curtly.

He didn't have to add that he was going to sort Rog the Dodger out, too, that went without saying.

**Merlin School, Cambridge, England, 2000**

**III: Hermione**

Hermione woke up in the morning with her eyes glued together by a headache so crushing it felt like there was a troll jumping up and down inside her sinus cavities, yanking on the tendons behind her eyes.

She was cold, and miserable, and shuffled as stiffly across her room to the sink and toilet in the closet of a bathroom as if she was a hundred and had arthritis in every joint.

Another half hour or so of coughing, blowing her nose, and sneezing went past, and then she shuffled back out to get dressed.

Hermione made her way to her morning lab, only to discover it was cancelled.

She would have stayed in the lab, anything to not have to go back to her room, but it was locked.

The other students passed by Hermione, chattering.

Their words made no sense to her; they looked like wraiths, even the slimy stone walls of the forbidding old castle were beginning to look unreal.

Everything seemed remote, unreal, nonexistent.

Shuffling aimlessly down the hall, Hermione felt warmth around her feet, and saw the cheeriest shaft of light she'd seen in months coming out from under the door she was passing.

She looked up at the writing in the door.

"Druids of the Vows Unbreakable, Hogsmeade Chapter, Students and Veterans Ministry."

Underneath it, a smaller sign.

"No appointment necessary. No witch or wizard refused. We are always here to help."

Hermione opened the door.

The office was very large, and very cheerful.

There were banners from all four houses of Hogwarts and one for the Order of the Phoenix hanging behind the charming old desk, and there was a great hearth with a roaring fire, and a very large window, with ornate purple velvet curtains.

The wizard behind the desk, whose face looked familiar, but Hermione couldn't remember the former Death Eater's name, looked up at her with a happy smile on his face, which turned to a look of concern.

"Erm, I'm Hermione Granger. And I need all the help I can get."

"The Hermione Granger? Please, sit down. I'll get the Druid."

It was hard to believe that the tall, distinguished-looking wizard with the neat goatee and benevolent face, in his purple Druid's robes had once been the evil Lord Voldemort.

"I never thought I'd be glad to see you." Hermione quipped.

"By the Gods, Miss Granger, you look terrible! Brother Demetrius, get me an Emergency kit. And make a bed ready."

"Yes, Druid."

The "emergency kit" turned out to be a rather fluffy blanket, a cup of hot chocolate, and a bowl of chicken soup.

"There's some vitamin potions in the soup, and a draught of Prince's Rejuvenating Tonic. Now, if you don't mind, Miss Granger, after you eat, right behind that curtain, you can have a good sleep in a nice warm bed, in a little room of your own. I think you should stay there for the rest of the day."

Hermione was slurping up the soup; it tasted really good.

"Am I that sick?"

"You don't look well. I think you just need a little rest."

Hermione yawned, the soup had made her sleepy.

"I could use a little rest." She agreed.

Druid Thomas ushered her towards the curtain.

"We'll send your house elf along, soon."

"Okay." Hermione just agreed.

It was a nice warm bed, and a bright, cheery room, and Hermione wasn't even coherent enough to discern the magic that created the little rooms beyond the curtains, she just curled right up and went to sleep.

Later, when she woke up to go to her afternoon classes, she was feeling a little better, but it only made it all the worse when she had to return to her miserable hole in the evening, after she was done studying.

Had she the emotional and physical strength to do so, Hermione would have cried, but seeing as how she didn't, she just got undressed for bed.

It was early, yet, only 8, but Hermione didn't care.

Time sleeping was time dreaming, time away from this place.

Then she put on the heavy thermal nightshirt she had bought several of for winters in this frozen-over hellhole, and crawled into her uncomfortable bed, shivering under her inadequate blanket, the damp from the slimy walls crawling into bed with her, in spite of the sad little fire that burned, dimly, in the crumbling hearth.

Hermione coughed, and swore under her breath until she fell into an exhausted sleep.

**IV: Snape**

Around the time that Hermione was falling into a shallow and fitful sleep, grown men and women in their twenties were sitting straighter in their chairs, diving out of the hallways into whatever room was open, or simply standing stiffly and unmanned, frozen with terror, like frightened children.

Because the malign spectre that had haunted their dreams since they were children at Hogwarts had returned, big as life and twice as nasty, looking more malign than ever.

Indeed, Snape looked quite like there might be blood and mayhem on his mind as he stalked briskly through the halls of one of the Merlin School's dormitory wings, his robes billowing dramatically behind him.

Most of the faces looked familiar, and he remembered all the names, but he didn't want to accost any idiot who might get scared enough to faint if he spoke to them.

As he ascended a winding stone staircase leading up to a large tower, Draco Malfoy fell into step behind him.

"She's up there, you know. Granger, I mean. You don't want to go in there, Uncle. I mean it. She's gone right out of her mind."

"She's been out of her mind for years, Draco. Where's Davies? Roger Davies?"

"He's at that end of the hallway. Granger's at this end."

Draco's rooms were in the middle, and he ducked into them, locked his door, went into his bedroom, locked that door, and after insisting that Pansy do the same, he hid under the bed.

Just to be sure.

Rog Davies was drunk again, so drunk that only something like the ancient oak door of his room splintering off it's iron hinges like balsa wood and crashing to the ground could have awakened him.

Many faces looked out from cracks in doors and windowsills and dark corners where they had taken refuge as Severus Snape strode over the door he had just obliterated, and dragged Rog the Dodger from his bed.

On first thoughts, he slammed the son of a bitch of a Southerner against the wall, and on second thoughts, picked him up by the front of his shirt and hoisted him into the air.

"I'm sorry, Professor Snape."

"Davies, you 'aven't begun to learn the meaning of the word! But you will."

Dark thoughts crowded Snape's mind.

Spells.

Hexes.

Potions.

Or, the sheer animal joy of leisurely beating Davies about the room until his blood and teeth were all over the walls, and he was reduced to a screaming, crying, tootlhless bloody pulp with several broken bones and some ruptured internal organs.

But, war hero or no, that would cost him his job and land him in Azkaban, so he contented himself to shake Davies until his teeth champed together, slap him around a touch, and then jack him up against the wall, again, one arm across the Cockney lout's throat.

"D'you know why I've come so close to splattering you all over this room?" Snape asked, almost conversationally.

"Because I shagged your bird?"

"No, you moron! Because I got your lazy Southern arse out of the gutter, tried to shove you into WAND, and wrote you a recommendation for this school, and you couldn't even stay sober enough to do what I asked you, and let me know if Granger was in trouble! You berk! You can consider yourself out of my service, and I hope you've been feathering your nest with more than empty bottles of Hell's Horntail ant St. George's Dragon!"

Snape tossed Davies back onto his bed.

"So, I'm sacked, sir?" he asked.

Snape mustered up all the willpower he had not to commence the beating this berk deserved.

"Sacked? When your exams are over, Davies, you might want to take a trip. For your health. Next time I see your face, I'll beat you like I own you. Because I do."

He left his former student with that parting shot, and walked on down the hall.

Hermione's door was not locked, which surprised Snape, but, a more unpleasant surprise was the creaking of the great oak door as he opened it.

The very sound, accompanied by a damp chill and the overwhelming stink of mildew and rot was enough to put a chill on your soul.

The room had certainly done it's damndest to make Hermione uncomfortable enough to want to change it; Snape had occasion to visit the solitary cells at Azkaban, and they weren't as damp, dreary, dismal, and depressing.

The walls of the room were wet with a disgusting slime, and there was the constant sound of dripping. Every wooden surface in the room was half-rotten with the damp and mildew, and Snape, who had grown up in the most squalid of conditions on the Spinner's End estate clapped his hand over his mouth before he could cast a protective spell, and keep the noxious air out of his lungs.

Hermione had nothing, quite literally.

Her mouldy table, piled high with parchments, books and papers, a rotting armoire with some long, greyish, lumpy thermal nightshirts, her Magus coat, and some nasty collections of threadbare things that smelled like the room that passed for robes.

And a small, narrow bed that she had moved as close as possible to the crumbling hearth with it's wan, pathetic flame.

All he could see of her was a mass of brown curls; she was curled tightly into a ball under the damp, rough blanket, and the thin mattress sagged so that she was very nearly sleeping on the freezing stone floor.

He still wasn't angry with her; he imagined that would come later, after he had her sorted out.

Snape got out his wand.

"Alright, room, time to get your shit together, then."

**IV: Hermione **

When she woke up, Hermione thought she was still dreaming, because she was not freezing, and the first breath of air she took didn't gag her.

She opened her eyes and saw a large window, hung with green and black curtains, that showed her a crisp, cold, but sunny winter day.

The sun had all sorts of surprises for her.

The room had gotten bigger, much bigger; there was a new door in it, altogether, and some nice furniture.

A couch, and a chair, green, sitting on a black rug, and a new desk in the corner.

By the hearth, which was now large, well made and cheery, with a huge roaring fire, a table and chairs with a tea set on the table, and in a little corner nook, a pot bellied stove where she could make said tea, which was warming the other half of the room, nicely.

And the bed was now comfortably large, queen sized, with four posters, like the beds at Hogwarts, its bedcurtains Gryffindor gold and red.

On the side of the bed where she slept there was another rug, so that her feet wouldn't touch the stone floor, also in Gryffindor colours, and Crookshanks was asleep on it, purring contentedly.

Still half-asleep, Hermione yawned, luxiourously, and snuggled into her nice, new bed happily nestling herself against the familiar warmth of the man who snored beside her.

Then, her eyelids flew open like they were on springs, and she sat up, like a shot, holding the green and black blankets against her chest like the heroine of a Victorian melodrama.

"Snape!" she cried.

"Lie down, Granger. You're stealing all the fucking blankets."

"What are you doing here? What's happened to me room? Why am I naked? What the fuck is going on?"

She got no answer, so Hermione shook him until he sat up with her.

"You are naked because there was an entire fucking ecosystem of moulds and mildew living in everything in this place, including those filthy grey sacks you were using for nightshirts. I had to scourgify you three times just to get the smell of mildew out of your hair. The room only got in that state because it's been trying to get you to change it for the past two and a half years. I sorted that out for you, as well. That's what I'm doing here. Sorting you out. As for what the fuck is going on, why don't you tell me? I've no fuckin' idea, I'm sure, you haven't so much as owled me in a year."

Hermione frowned.

"Snape, you know how I hate to talk about things. Can't we just leave it out?"

Snape hated to talk about things, too.

They had let all sorts of things that most people would have killed each other over just slide by, because of it.

"Granger, don't think you can rub your tits on me and slide out of this one, nice as you please! I mean, a man my age, an ugly old bastard like me, he spends half his life in mourning, then he meets a bird he really gives a shit about, and she just ups and makes herself scarce for a whole year. Then, I come here an' find you've been polishing Rog Davies plonker for him, and that you're barely living in conditions that the law forbids us to keep condemned prisoners in Azkaban under. It's not something you can sweep under the bloody rug!" Snape snapped.

"Well I don't know what happened, do I? Why are you asking me? Rog wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he was expedient, willing and didn't mind it being no strings. I never mentioned it to you because it was beneath notice. As for the rest, I'm fucked if I know how it's all happened! I'm pursuing two Masters at once, here, and the work just, well, it sucked me in, didn't it? I sort of went away , if you want to know the truth; and the work was all there was. Oh sure, I had enough presence of mind to be bitter, angry, anxious, and depressed, but I never thought about it. I never thought of anything but the work. I know it sounds odd, Snape, but it's true, I swear it is."

Snape sighed, resignedly.

"If it was anybody else, I'd think they were full of shit. But not you. I was your professor for seven years, and I've been the unfortunate fool in your bed since you were 16. I know how you drive yourself. And I know how important it is to you, to be the biggest, the brightest, and the best, don't I? Still, I imagine I'll fly into a few rages over it, with you, here and there, and I'm likely to take it out on you and be a complete arse'ole for the next six months, but, fuck it. These things, they happen, don't they? But, for fuck's sake Granger, next time you feel yourself going off the deep end, at least owl your parents, will you. Now, I don't want to talk about it anymore. I'm going back to sleep. I've been up for two nights over you."

"Me parents! Gods, they must be frantic? And what about Ginny and Harry? And Ron? They must be furious with me!"

"They're not. They think you've gone potty. Right round the fucking twist. They'll be happy you're sane, or, as sane as you get." Snape said to the pillow.

Hermione started shaking him again.

"Goddamnit, Granger if you fucking do that once more, I'll give you back your Bucky the Beaver teeth!"

"But I have to get up! I have to…"

"Granger, what you have to do is take a little break. Sleep in. Smell the roses. Eat something. You've lost too much weight, and you've got bags under your eyes. Everyone's been waiting on you a year, they can wait a little longer until you don't look so much like death on a biscuit."

"Do I look that bad?"

"Yes."

He rolled over, and Hermione planted her foot in the small of his back, and kicked Snape out of bed.

"Well, then, Mr. Universe, you'll be wanting to go sleep on the couch, won't you, you manky, ugly, greasy old git!" she shouted.

"That's you, Granger, innit it? First thing you want to do is fight? You don't thank me, you won't let me sleep, you take it for granted I'll make you my apprentice, you're not sorry for the piss poor way you've treated me, no, you want to fight! Well, you do look like death on a biscuit, don't you, because you've driven yourself into the ground! It's not my fault! And I would suggest you don't go kicking this ugly old git out of your bed, the way you've shaped up, there aren't going to be a great whopping load of wizards knocking down your door!" Snape shouted back.

Hermione got out of bed and looked in the green and black mirror on the back of the door to the new room.

She looked a little thin, for her, although not much, and her nose was a bit red, and her eyes were a little bloodshot and she had some dark circles, but death on a biscuit?

Not half!

"You fucking wanker, I just look like I've had flu for awhile, or something! You scared me, I thought I looked like death, or something!"

"Well, excuse me for being worried about you! Someone has to be, you're not!"

Snape got back in the bed, and pulled up the covers.

So did Hermione.

There was always one thing a good scrap with the old git put her in the mood for.

"C'mon, now, Sev, I'm sorry. You know I'm also the craziest witch in my year. You haven't really given me a chance to thank you, 'ave you, now?"

The golden thing about Severus Snape wasn't that he came barging into the school like an angry demon, or that he had probably frightened Rog Davies back into rehab, or even that he had spent the whole night sorting out her room for her.

The absolutely fucking golden thing was the way he rolled right over, grinning his crooked smile at her with his mouthful of gold pirate teeth, and hauled her close to his hairy, scarred, tattooed chest without a second thought about all the time that had gone by, and everything she'd done.

He didn't care a monkey's, he really didn't, not at all.

"Do you know how long it's going to be before I let you out of my sight, again, you crazy witch?"

"All morning?"

"At least."

* * *

"Wake up, Granger. Let's go. You have work to do. Then, you're going to your parents for dinner."

Hermione sat up, yawning.

Snape was dressed, and looking over her schedule.

"I see you have two more weeks of class. And then finals. Not looking forward to those, are you, then?"

Hermione got up, walked over to her new armoire, and began shrugging herself into some of her new robes.

"Bath, Granger. You smell like a ten-person orgy and you've got come in your hair. Now, about those finals. Albus and I have spoken to the Headmaster, here, and he thinks that you are far above and beyond any exams that your teachers could arrange for you, and that two weeks more of class isn't going to do much for you. So, I've arranged with him to supervise your finals at Hogwarts. You'll have four weeks to prepare instead of two. Of course, it's two weeks before Chrimble, and I'm not an ogre, so we'll do it after Christmas vacation."

"What?"

"I know how smart you really are, Granger. If you're going to be a Potions Mistress, and my apprentice, then you're going to have to earn it. Do you like this room?"

"Erm…yes?"

"Then move it all to the South Apprentice Tower at Hogwarts. Magically. I will be there in…twenty minutes. I'm sure you can sort it all out my then. At least I hope you can. Or I'll have to start deducting points from your final grade."

Hermione just stood there, staring at him.

"I said I was going to be a real bastard for six months, didn't I?" he asked, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.

"I can pass any test you can think of with my hands tied behind my back! And, as for this lot, you and me and the whole fucking works are going to be there one bleedin' hell of a lot sooner than twenty minutes."

Hermione grabbed her wand from the table, and, waving her arms grandly, beagn to recite in Old Elvish.

She was suffused in purple light, and began to levitate into the air.

Snape was beside himself

"You daft sod, not the bloody Elvish Transmigration spell!" Snape shouted.

Hermione gave him the two finger salute, and finished the spell.

Snape flattened himself on the floor as if Artie "Tommy Boy" Evans had come in and started blasting the place with his trademark machine gun.

There was a great bang, and the last thing Snape sww before putting his head down and covering his hands with it was a thin plume of purple extending from Hermione's wand out into the sky, where a rather sizeable vortex in space time was opening.

With a large continuous whoosh, an and extremely bright purplish flash of light that began to shine out of every conceivable crevice of the entire Merlin School, they were off.

He became aware that either he left the floor, or the floor left him, and amid the less than gentle motion of the room, it's enchantment, it's contents and himself and Hermione, Snape grabbed onto one of the rugs as it flew by, and latched onto it.

Soon enough, he was aware of the fading of the purple light, and that under him and the rug, there was a floor under him, again.

He waited a few moments, and then took his arms from over his head.

He, and Hermione, and everything from her room, including the enchantment that allowed you to magically re-arrange and re-create the layout of the room had been transported to the South Apprentice Tower at Hogwarts.

"Well, I think I'll have that bath." She said, slipping on the furry red and gold bathrobe that she found in her new furniture.

"Nice touch, Sev." She told him.

Snape got to his feet, and was about to flop into Herminone's chair when he heard pounding on the door, and opened it.

There was Albus Dumbledore, and Professor McGonagall bringing up the rear.

"Severus, did you do the Elvish Transmogrification spell? I've had an astonished floo from Headmaster MacCrundle at the Merlin School! He's not sure whether to be horrified or impressed. Neither are we."

"No, that was Granger."

"Hermione? Our Hermione? Minerva, ring up the Daily Prophet! Miss Granger is the youngest witch ever to master Old Elvish spellcraft! She's tied your record again, Severus. Is the alright?"

"She's having a bath."

"A bath?" Dumbledore asked.

"Yes. A bath. That's what you do after you create and travel through an Elvish wormhole in space time, innit it? Have a bath. Then she's going to do see Poppy. And them she's going to have dinner with her parents." Snape replied, archly.

"Has she hurt herself?" McGonagall asked.

"No, but you wouldn't believe the state her room was in. The solitary cells at Azkaban are more sanitary. I should have checked up on her, earlier."

"Severus, you're not her keeper." Albus reminded him.

"The Hell I'm not. Her, and my son, and his crazy red-haired girlfriend and that idiot brother of hers. I've been their keeper since they were ten. Why stop now? Excuse me. I have to make sure she hasn't fallen asleep in the bath."

After Snape shut the door, Albus could hear him hollering at Hermione, and her saying something snarky, back.

"…might have fuckin' well killed us, what were you tryin' to prove, then?"

"That you're a great greasy git, you old Scouser bastard…"

"It's good to have her home, and everything back to normal." He pronounced.

"Albus, you have a very strange idea of what normal is." Minerva replied.

_(Author's Note: If you like my Potter stories, and you also like comics, go to my profile and check out the stories I wrote for X-Men, Ironman, and Watchmen. Am pondering a Watchmen/Potter crossover? Shall I? Maybe. Thanks for all you support!)_


	2. Heartbreaker

**Chapter Two: Heartbreaker**

**Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, January, 2001**

**I: Snape**

With what was actually quite a Happy Christmas behind him, even though Snape was loath to admit that he had actually enjoyed the holiday he'd always professed to despise, he was wracking his brains trying to figure out what the hell to do about Granger.

Of all her circle of friends, she was the one whose sanity he was the most concerned about.

Harry had already, and quite gaudily, gone off his nut and bottomed out; he was on a fairly even keel, now.

Ginny Weasley was far too cheerfully amoral to let the war really bother her; as long as there were men and Quidditch, she wasn't going to go round the bend.

Her brother didn't have enough of a mind to lose.

Actually, in their ways, Harry, Ginny, and, he supposed, Ron, had all done something to exorcise the demons the war created in them, but Hermione kept herself closed off.

She had the capacity to completely deny her emotions to the point where she could shut herself off from the world, utterly, as her final year in the Merlin School demonstrated.

He had come upon her in the nick of time, catching the floating red balloon of her sanity at the last moment before it floated off into space, forever, as she was happily waving bye-bye to it.

Then, there was the personal aspect of it.

Personal?

Don't split hairs in your own mind, Snape, there's no one in here but you, listening.

You love her, you fucking old tosser.

Snape had no intention of falling for any other witch after his wife was murdered, and he had succeeded in that intention until the thinking man's Lolita came into his life.

He liked, sometimes, to think that he was doomed from that first moment she leaned too far over the lab table, with odd socks on, one pulled up around her knee and the other bunched around her ankle, her hair in two messy, bushy ponytails, and just as she solved a problem that had been vexing him for months, leaned over a little further, so that her skirt rode up and he could see that her knickers were just as tatty and unkempt as his y-fronts.

He had broken every rule he'd ever made for himself since he was a boy of 21 for her.

It was madness, a man his age taking up with a girl who was only a few months past the age of consent, a student, but Granger was so fucking brilliant, and so fucking horny and so fucking beautiful.

Yes, she was a beautiful girl.

Those idiots and toerags and morons and dunderheads she went to classes with had to see her kitted out in a gown like Cinderella before they noticed it; but Snape could see how beautiful she was when she'd slept in her clothes for three nights; it shined out of her, like her intelligence.

And her spirit.

She was no plastic Scouser, her roots were as deep in the muddy Mersey as he was, she was as tough and true a little Scouser bird as any the 'Pool had ever produced.

Anyone who said different to his face, who said she was bookish and geeky or anything stronger, he'd rip their lungs out.

Without the use of _sectumsempra_.

Of course, in the beginning, he had no intention of becoming so attached to Granger, but, as his father was fond of observing, these things do happen, when you spend enough time with a woman.

And wasn't it wonderful that the woman it happened with was his student, who was the same age, give or take a few months, as his son?

It was even more wonderful when he was forced to reveal the affair to an already snickering Wizarding World, for her own safety, after she was blackmailed by a werewolf serial killer whom, he had to admit, she and Ginny Weasley executed in a justly and satisfyingly gruesome fashion.

Still, no teacher was ever as proud of his student as when Hermione, with confident rage in her eyes, blasted those chairs out of her path in order to destroy what was left of dying Oliver Crich after she had struck the bull werewolf with such a forceful _Sectumsempra_ that she'd nearly severed his head.

And all after he had disarmed her.

But, after that, when he had to reveal their liason, publicly, well, it was a fucking circus indeed.

Rumours about them had circulated for years, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a witch or wizard of any age who hadn't been finding the idea of manky, greasy old Scouser Snape and bushy-haired, rumpled, everlasting-know-it-all and Scouser Granger together completely hilarious.

When the rumours proved true, even though there was a war going on, the good old WW convulsed with laughter.

Even though they were both War Heroes, that did not stop the endless parade of jokes about thick Northerners sticking together, that Snape was the only one "nerdy and dirty" enough for Granger and vice versa, and of course, his personal favourite, that standing next to him, Hermione Granger looked like a veela.

It had taken Snape as long to build himself a reputation as a man of dignity and honor as it had for him to make his reputation as a deadly, degenerate, drug addict and Death Eater. For four years, because of his connection with Hermione, as her guru and her lover, he endured rumour, and ridicule, and recriminations. He suffered everything from the pornographic graffitos he felt as though he spent half his fucking life erasing from the school's walls to nosy reporters and regular salacious articles in the Tattler, but he did so largely with strength and quiet dignity, because he felt it was worth it to have Granger as his apprentice and his woman.

And then, after all that, she had the fucking balls to waltz the fuck out of his life, not so much as owl for a year, and then assume she could slide right back in like everything was just peachy?

And she thought she was just going to get away with that?

Had she any idea the hell she had put him through?

First he had to suffer the agony of his worst fear coming true, that at university Granger would find not just a warm mouth and a stiff prick in the dark, but that she would spurn him for a man who was younger, and unless he was Quasimodo, better looking that he was?

The sniggers behind hands, and the pitying looks.

It almost drove him back to the bottle.

He had actually bought a bottle of Hell's Horntail and took it with him to his bunker; it was a good thing that Harry kept as sharp an eye on his old Da as Snape kept on his son.

Harry talked him out of it.

Then, worse, when the talk began to change, and it was being said that Hermione had come undone; that she had burned herself out, that madness had taken her, crouching alone and unhallowed in the dark before guttering candles, toiling away in a mouldy tomb, like something out of a Gothic novel?

For him to lose her, that would have been horrible.

But for her to lose her beautiful mind?

That would have been an unspeakable tragedy.

Was she aware that he had saved her from that fate, despite the fact that she made him ans arsehole out off him in front of the Wizarding World?

Did she know people were still looking at her as if she was about to go around the twist any minute, now?

And what was there to do about all of it?

Hermione seemed willing to sweep it under the rug, and Snape would have liked nothing more than to help her, but worry and anger both ate away at his guts, and he got the feeling he had to do something.

Something to shock her out of the dissociative daze she was still partially lost in.

Something to make her realise that she had done him up a treat.

He supposed he could sack her.

But that would not only be unfair, it was insane.

Snape couldn't imagine taking on anyone else as his apprentice.

No other witch or wizard he's taught in the last ten years had a quarter of the intelligence, native skill, and magical ablility that Granger had when she was 16, let alone, now.

Her tenure at the Merlin School showed the world she wasn't just the smartest witch in her year, she was the most brilliant of her generation, whether or not she was fucking mad.

He'd have to be a solid gold fucking idiot to pass up having her as his apprentice.

But then again, to have taken up with Hermione Granger at all, he had to have been a solid gold fucking idiot.

Not knowing what else to do, Snape fell back on the old standby.

Being a wicked old screw and a rotten snarky bastard.

It wasn't much, but it would do, until he could sort it all out.

**II: Hermione**

Christmas?

Christmas was absolutely brilliant.

It was golden, it was red with purple flashes.

After a year entombed in her mouldy grave at the Merlin School, with only Rog the Dodger as occasional company, to be back with her family, and her friends, and the Snape-Princes and the Weasleys, it was like something out of a dream.

Being back with Snape, himself was a different kind of dream altogether.

Good old Sev in all his hairy, greasy, tattooed, hard nut Scouser glory, Mage of the Third Degree in Sex Magick, he of the original Firebolt, Hermione found herself breathless, a little overtired, and having to pee quite a lot, but she was nonetheless basking happily like a lizard in the sunshine of Sev's love, whether it was another porny performance, or just spending time with him, watching telly or having an argument about obscure Elvish magical grimores, or talking about things in general.

That was what she thought of, after a long day of hard work, her first back at Hogwarts after the holiday break, toiling away in preparation for her finals.

She dragged herself to her cheery tower room, wondering why Snape hadn't said anything to her when she knocked off for the night.

She was in the bath, soaking away the day's stress when she heard her door open, and bang shut.

"Granger! Come on then, dry off! I don't want to be late for dinner; I'm cooking tonight. Pull the fucking anchor in!"

When Hermione came out of the bathroom, Snape was dressed in his usual off duty uniform of tee shirt and jeans, both old, faded, and black.

He was puffing away, and wreathed in his usual halo of bluish smoke.

"Granger, I'll want you to grade the first year's mandrakes for me. And if you have any time left after you're night's studying and preparation after that, you can make up the solutions of dragon's blood and wolfsbane for my third years. If you can't manage it tonight, you'll have to get up all the earlier tomorrow for it, because I want it fucking done by breakfast, and what I don't want is a load of your excuses."

And he left.

She didn't think anything of it.

Snape was a moody old bastard, and a wicked old screw, and whatever he was having a shit over, she wasn't too worried about it.

Hermione was more preoccupied with settling into her new routine at Hogwarts, as a faculty member and not a student.

But, every day that week, it was the same routine.

He was all business, all day, and other than that he was completely schtum.

Then, right before he left to go home for the night he'd, order her to do six impossible things before breakfast, and leave.

The next morning, when he found she did them all, flawlessly, every day he would just raise his eyebrow at her, and ask her if she was going to hover around all morning, or just get to work.

That was when Hermione realised the old tosser was up to something, and he was making good on his threat to be a right bastard for the next six months.

She knew she had behaved abominably, and figured that she was no better off than she ought to have been, and decided to just keep toiling away for her final and take her medicine.

Even though the dread finals were approaching, and Snape was behaving like an arsehole, Hermione was thoroughly enjoying her return to her home away from home.

It was gratifying to be seen as a hero and a scholar, rather than as an annoying everlasting-know-it-all.

And, at long last, she no longer had to bear the sniggerings of gits about her personal business with Snape with either silent fortitude, quick furtive hexes, or even the odd punch in the gob.

Walking by a group of fifth years, one Nostradamus O'Rourke, who was an awfully nasty piece of work, and in his second fifth year, threw out a particularly insulting crack about her and Snape both being thick Northerners, and something about his nose, his plonker, and her "tunnel of love".

Hermione turned on her heel.

"Right, O'Rourke, we'll have no more of that! Twenty points from Ravenclaw, and one week's detention with Professor Snape, who will be informed of your witty and imaginative comments about him." She snapped.

The boys looked shocked.

"And ten more points from Hufflepuff and Gryffindor for the lot of you listening. Now, break it up before I hand out some more detentions. Off you get! Double geschvinn."

The group scattered, admirably.

Hermione was in fine spirits as she told Snape about the whole incident.

"Fascinating, Granger. Don't you have better things to do?" he replied, coldly.

In the second week of his colossal snit, the way Snape was treating her was really starting to hurt, and Hermione was just itching to have a good scrap with him.

"What's your game, then, you greasy old git? Am I getting all the nasty that you've been saving up for me over the past year, then? Have you decided to celebrate the concluding years of your thirties by taking a vow of celibacy? I'll not put up with it much longer. I dare say you're less stingy with Sibyl on Wednesdays, and it's not going to lick itself, is it? I may not be Lavender fucking Brown, but I am General Granger, War Hero. I'm sure I could at the very least get a quick shag and little head out of that, peddling it down at the Hog's Head."

Usually a salvo like that would get the old bastard to fire a shot of his own across the bow, but Snape just looked at her like she was something he found on the bottom of his boot.

"Granger, you are the Apprentice and I am the Master. If you keep talking to me like that during working hours, you'll find yourself out on your arse. And good luck finding another Master to take you after I've sacked you."

"What about after working hours are over?" she insisted

"I do have a life, now, yunno. I have a house of my own, and a son to finish raising, and two lodgers who used to be my students who's parents expect me to make sure they stay out of trouble. Then there's my family, and socialising with what members of this Faculty I can stand, so I don't have a lot of time after working hours are over to fuck about with a witch who's made it quite clear she's got no interest in having a part of my life other than the part that sticks out the furthest. You're an Apprentice here, now, talk to Albus if you've got some problem with the lodgings and working conditions."

"Alright, Snape, I can understand you giving me the cold shoulder, but that really fucking hurts!" Hermione snapped.

He got genuinely angry with her, then.

"Does it, Granger? Have I finally managed to penetrate the fog of self-serving bullshit you surround yourself with, and the big party in your head long enough to make you feel a complex emotion? I gave you this apprenticeship. That's more than you gave me. You can't just slide back into me life like nothing's fucking wrong, you know! If you don't like it, quit. Fuck you. Now, get y plastic Scouser arse out of me office and go do your job or you'll lose it!" Snape snapped.

Hermione stood there for a few minutes, trying to formulate a reply.

Suddenly, it wasn't their usual exchange of witty barbs and snarky profanity-laden insults.

For the first time, she really thought about the whole thing from Snape's perspective, and she realised that she had done a terrible thing, for which she really had no good excuse, and that Christmas was like a Band-Aid on a sucking chest wound.

Snape looked up from his work.

"Well? Go on, then, fuck off out of me office! And don't come around 'ere again actin' like you're anything more than me apprentice, because you fuckin' well aren't!" he shouted

Feeling like she had been stung by a swarm of wasps, Hermione went back to her rooms.

Clearly she had to smooth things over with Snape, to ease his anger, to let him know she really did still love him, not in spite of the fact that he was a manky old git of a hard nut Scouser, but because of it.

She had two choices.

She could suddenly become incredibly seductive.

Yes.

But, how did that bit go?

Should she put rouge on her lips, and her nipples, and possibly someplace else, and spread herself naked all over the bed and take on like an actress in a porny as soon as Snape came into the room?

That would probably knock him out of his surly self-restraint, and perhaps a good shag would go along way towards making things better.

But, Hermione wasn't sure if she was capable of shouting filthy things unless she was in the heat of the moment, and she expected that putting make-up on her naughty bits would at least make her come out in a rash.

Her other choice was to tell him the truth.

To actually talk about her…_feelings_.

Hermione looked up the pot of lip gloss she kept on hand for formal occasions, and started stripping off.

Hermione left her room and went to the Divination Tower.

She knocked, and Professor Trelawney, no, Sibyl, now, came to the door, with her quill stuck in her hair and an armful of papers.

"Oh. Hello, Hermione. Wait, let me put these things…somewhere…"

She dropped most of them.

"Oh. Well. That's that, I imagine. I'll pick them up later. Are you here to sign up for yoga? I really think you should."

"Can I borrow some rouge from you, Sibyl?"

Sibyl frowned.

"Hermione, luv, a little rouge isn't going to cover over the number you've done on yourself in the past year. Now, I know you think I'm just a dizzy old hippie, but if you changed your diet, did some yoga, learned some meditation techniques, it would help you quite a bit I can tell from your skin that you must be anaemic, and from your hair that you're not getting enough vitamins…"

"Actually, I'm in a bit of a hurry right now. Ummm, let me give you a few knuts for the rouge. When I'm done with it, you won't want it back."

For a moment, Sibyl looked completely confused.

"That'll give you a terrible rash. Hermione, are you and Toby having some personal problems?" she asked.

Briefly, Hermione thought to herself that there was something terribly wrong with her discussing her personal problems with Snape with the woman he'd been spending Wednesday nights with since before Hermione was born, but then again, who would know him better?

"Why don't you come in and we'll have a cup of tea?" she suggested.

If Hermione didn't know better, she would have sworn that Sibyl put something in the tea, because she let the whole story out.

"Does that sound like something he would do?"

"Who, Toby? Let me tell you something about Toby. He's a good man, and a brave man, and there were times when he was my only real friend in the world, but he can be quite an arsehole. Mind, it's amusing when he's being an arsehole to other people, but not quite so charming when he's being an arsehole to you. Now, there's only one way to deal with him when he starts acting like, and pardon my French, the world's biggest cunt."

Hermione laughed, a little, at that.

"Fight fire with fire?"

"Exactly. I could never do that, so when he gets stroppy with me, I just change my password on my locks."

Hermione snorted.

"Not me! I'm every bit as much of an arsehole as that manky Scouser git! He'll be no better off than he ought to've been, fucking about with me!" she asserted.

"I can see that. Now, when you leave here, go back to your tower and lock your door, and ward it, and if he threatens to sack you again, threaten him that you're going to tell Albus what he's up to. And if he does sack you, I know Remus would take you as an apprentice, in a moment. Then, tomorrow, when he's business as usual with you, you be the same with him. And, on Wednesday, he and I are going to have a little talk."

"But, you know, I was wrong, doing what I did. Not so much as owling him for a year."

"Yes, you were. But Toby shouldn't be punishing you for it, like he's still your professor and you were late for class. You're both wrong, it's just that he's acting your age, and not his. But still, Hermione, you do know that eventually, you and he are going to have to talk about it."

Hermione poured out the last of the tea and took a sip.

She made a face, and not at the tea.

"Christ, not that! I'll get the rouge."

Professor Trelawney started to laugh, and Hermione did, too.

"You know, everyone's been telling me how awful I look. My mother cried when she saw me. And Eileen, you know, Snape's mother, she was saying how I don't look well, and she wanted to evaluate me, and Madame Pomfrey, well, Poppy, I mean, she wants me to have an exam, and you too, now. Maybe I should do something about the shape I'm in."

"That might be a good idea, too."

Back in her rooms, Hermione felt like she wanted to laugh when she saw the doorknob working to and fro, and heard Snape outside, swearing.

So, laugh she did.

Right or wrong, she wasn't going to let him talk to her like that.

"How d'yer like that, you toerag! I wouldn't let you in here if you had the last plonker on Earth, you berk!' she howled.

"Granger, you open this fucking door or-"

Disregarding what Sibyl said, but ever so slightly, Hermione opened the door.

"Or what? Just go ahead and say you'll sack me! I'm sure that WOW (Wizarding Organisation of Women) would love to hear about that! You want it to be strictly business between us, fine! And if you keep givin' me impossible tasks to complete every night, I'll report you to the Headmaster, and the Magical Labourers Union! And since it's after working hours, and I'm on me free time I can tell you to fuck off out of it, you berk!" Hermione yelled.

Then she slammed the door shut.

She heard him swearing outside the door a little while longer, and then he took it on his toes.

She had just finished studying, and was thinking about going to the Faculty Lounge, to scare up a conversation with somebody when she heard Harry's voice coming from the fireplace.

"Hey, stranger? You're not going to get lost in space again, are you?"

"Not bloody likely."

"You want to come over and watch telly with me and Ron?"

"Ron watches telly?"

"Oh yeah. Since he's been living here, he's gotten into it."

"You mean at Snape's house? We're not on good terms, right now."

"I know it. He's been in a black mood all night. But, fuck, it's my house too, ain't it? And Ginny pays her rent on her room, and Ron on his, so what's he got to say about it?"

Hermione remembered Snape saying something about two lodgers.

Finding out who those lodgers were was incredibly amusing.

"Where's Ginny?"

"Malfoy's. Well?"

Hermione smiled to herself.

"Why the hell not?"

**West Derby, Liverpool. Home of Severus Snape. **

Of course, it was a bit of a setup.

Harry's grandmother, co-proprietess of Prince's Potions, ex-junkie, formerly and probably still the brightest witch in her year, Third Degree Master Magus in the Arts, which included healing, was there waiting for Hermione.

After a through physical, Eileen, who conferred with Poppy Pomfrey via floo, diagnosed anemia, exhaustion, malnutrition, and chronic sinusitis due to massive infestation of spores, mold and fungus.

The prescription was complicated.

She was going to have to imbibe daily vitamin potions, twice-daily replenishing potions, three sniffs per day of Prince's Rosy Nosy Potion, a best seller for congested witches and wizards, three weeks worth of good old fashioned penicillin, and a diet high in iron, vitamins and essential oils as planned by Sibyl Trelawney.

Also yoga once weekly, and she was to learn to meditate, and do it at least twice a day.

"And one more thing. You're going to have to talk to the Antichrist."

Of course, Eileen Snape was talking about her son.

After Eileen left, and Hermione had her clanking bag of potions and her diet, copies of which had been provided to Winky and the house elves in the Hogwarts' kitchen, she was alone with her friends.

"You're not mad at us, are you, Hermione?" Ron asked.

"Cor, so that's what it's like to be on the other ed of an Intervention!" Harry commented.

"No. Actually, right now, I think I need all the hope I can get. So, lets watch some telly, and I'll have some…uhh…celery with peanut butter."

Winky apparated with a crack.

"Winky will gets it! Winky has already memorised the whole list!" the house elf announced.

"I can't believe you got Ron hooked on telly." Hermione chastised Harry.

Harry shrugged.

"He likes the music stations. And Monty Python."

"Who doesn't?"

**Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Divination Tower. Wednesday night**

**III: Snape**

"…I suppose I've gone too far. But I don't know if I can get on with this, Sibyl. I am so fucking furious at that woman, I could kill her."

"But you still love her?"

"Would I be this bleedin' mad if I wasn't? "

Sibyl leaned across the bed, over Snape, and turned on the light..

"Toby, you've been behaving awfully to Hermione. She told me everything. You forget how young she is. I understand how you must feel. You want to scream at her, fuck, woman, don't you know any better? But that's the thing, Toby. She doesn't. She's only 21 years old. When you were her age, you thought it was fine to shag your students, provided they were over 16, because you were only five years older than they were. And so did I. That's how dumb we were. Hermione might be a little further up the tree than either of us were when we were around her age, recently-rehabbed burnouts that were were, but she's still so young. I'm not saying she isn't old enough to know better than to completely abandon you and everyone else for a year, but when she did it, she probably didn't give a second thought to the effect it would have on her family, and her friends, and you. You don't think twice when you're that young. Not until something happens that makes you. This is probably that thing for Hermione. But you can't force her to realise she's done the wrong thing by being a cruel, evil bastard to her, and playing mind games with her. It's cruel, you going from, 'I forgive you, Happy Christmas, be my apprentice, now let's make love' one minute to, "Fuck you, do your job, we're through' the next." Sibyl volunteered.

"She has to be taught a lesson! She can't just go off like that! She'll never be able to hold down a job, or have anything like a normal life. And I can't just let her walk all over me, because she's pretty and young and I'm an ugly old bastard, can I?"

"So that's it? Toby, I'm surprised at you! I thought you were smarter than that!"

"What?"

"Listen to yourself! You sound like some stupid barroom lout! Worried that you're going to lose your girl to another man because she's young and pretty and you're old and ugly? Figuring as how you'll fucking well teach her to toe the line? Where'd you learn to think like that? Living on the banks of the Mersey and watching your father and mother take swings at each other, I'll bet!"

Snape thought about it, and he couldn't help but smile.

"She may be from Woolton, Sibyl, but Hermione's no plastic Scouser. The way she gave me some GBH on the ears the other day, I thought she might decide to do some GBH on me person."

"That's what you don't want. Look, Toby, I know how you hate this sort of thing, but you're going to have to talk to her. I told her the same thing, and she looked just as horrified as you do. Hermione may be, like you Northerners say, a right Scouser, but for her to have drifted off into some Never-Never land without so much as a belt of firewhiskey to send her there, and stayed there for a year, there has to be something bothering her. She could have done anything after she left the Merlin School. Coming back here to you, and to Hogwarts, it was a cry for help. Toby, she needs you. She needs all of us at this school. Hermione has just been through a terrible experience. You rescued her from it, and brought her home, to Hogwarst and to her family, you should know that. We'tre all trying to help Hermione. Your Mum and Poppy have examined her, and I've written her a new diet, and she's going to join my yoga classes and learn to meditate. If we let her down, she'll go to pieces, and the brightest witch in her generation will end up running into the arms of some lout who will have her barefoot and pregnant within a year. Or she might start drinking, and getting high, and shagging anything likely bloke who's heard of General Granger. Or worse. None of Dumbledore's Army died in the Final Battle. But, in the past three years, we've had five deaths. One overdose, two suicides, a murder, and a road accident in Muggle London. Let's not make it six. I know you feel you've done all you can for her, Toby, but you're just going to have to do more."

Snape lit a cigarette.

"You're right, of course. And it's not as if I didn't know that. I suppose it's like Moony always says. It'sno picnic having a young girl. They're a lot of fun, but in the end, you always have to be daddy, and not just in bed." Snape observed.

"Toby, you don't make her call you daddy, do you? That's so…well, it's nasty, isn't it?"

"Sibyl, I don't make Hermione do anything. She's a filthy little girl." He replied.

**Hogwarts Faculty Dining Room, Thursday**

Of course, Snape knew that Sibyl was right.

Hermione's finals were coming up on Monday next; in the state of mind she was in, she would be sure to fail, and that would be on his head.

It was business as usual the next morning in the Faculty Dining Hall, and Hermione sat with him, as usual, because she was expected to.

Although their conversation had been a little stilted as of late.

If there was a more wretched hive of gossip and busybodying that the Hogwarts Faculty Dining Hall, Snape didn't know about it.

So he wasn't about to give his fellow professors and Hermione's fellow apprentices the satisfaction of displaying their dirty laundry for all to see, even though all eyes had been upon them for the past few days.

Especially Albus's.

He was a world champion busybody.

"How's your studying going, then, Granger."

"Fine."

"After classes, today, before I go home, I'll want to meet with you, about some specifics for your first exam. What about those first year essays?"

"I must say, in large part, they weren't very good. Even for first years."

"You should see what I get from the 7th years when they start to get the Seventh Year Itch. It makes the first years' work look like Cagliostro." Snape observed.

Hermione laughed, a bit, and they went back to eating.

"Snape, why are you staring at my plate?"

"Just making sure what's on your plate is on your diet. Did you take this morning's potions?"

"Yes. Checking your investment, Snape?"

"You're my apprentice, Granger. Among other things. You used to be my student. The last time I took my eyes off you, you went round the twist, and did a year long disappearing act. I won't let it happen, again."

"Yes sir, boss."

Snape realised that all eyes and ears were on them.

Albus was even standing by the coffee service for an inordinate amount of time.

"We're done talking, now, Albus. You can go sit down." Hermione joked.

There was a general murmur of laughter in the dining room.

"Oh, that's alright, Hermione, my dear. I can still hear you from my side of the table." He joked.

After hours, Hermione waited for Snape in his office.

"I don't want to talk in me office about personal shit. The walls in this place have fucking ears. Seeing as you're at my house almost every night, eating my food and parked in front of my telly, maybe you won't mind coming there with me?'

Hermione shrugged, and they apparated home, to Liverpool.

**West Derby, Liverpool. Home of Severus Snape**

"Now, listen to this one, Hermione. Between her sixth and seventh years, Hermione Granger went through quite a transformation. From bookish, bushy-haired and petite to statuesque and stunning. Her long, shiny hair fell about her slender shoulders in flowing auburn waves, and when she walked, it was with the strut of a stripper and the grace of a swan. It was something Professor Snape didn't fail to notice. All of the girls were in love with Snape; he was a devastatingly handsome man, tall, smooth-skinned and lithe, with soulful, deep blue eyes and the kind of long hair that they would have loved to have run their fingers through."

As Ginny read, Hermione broke into peals of laughter.

"Who writes this shite?" she howled.

"This one's better. Hermione Granger was the smartest witch in her year, and might have been the horniest, but she wasn't the best looking, and never gave a thought to making herself look more attractive. As it was, she didn't want anything to do with her schoolmates, they were only boys. What Hermione wanted was a man. A man who was every bit as smart, and every bit as randy as she was. Of course there was only one man at Hogwarts who filled that bill, and, except for his gargantuan cock and the fact that, tattoos and scars set aside, he had a decent body, if you liked hairy, rawboned Scouse louts, was a man who made Hermione look like a Page Three girl. Severus Snape. He was a wicked old screw, and he had his eye on horny little Hermie, and at his first convenience, he gave her a detention to be served, after hours, in his office…"

Snape grabbed the book from her.

"We'll have no more of that! Why do you insist on reading that shit at the table?" he snapped.

"Yeah. People are trying to eat." Ron agreed.

"Awww, and I had one I was going to read, too. It's got this great sentence in it. It's got you and Hermione doing the dirty deed on the teacher's table in the Great Hall, and just when you pop her hood, she says—"

"_Zippopotamus_!"

Hermione's wand was out, and after that rather novel spell, a zipper appeared at the corner of Harry's mouth, and zipped his lips shut.

"One of yours, Hermione?" Snape asked.

"Oooo, I like that one. You've got to teach it to me." Ginny observed.

"It's not too complicated. And yes, it's one of mine. Harry, promise me you will not finish that sentence. Or anything like it. Or I'll zip your lips for the rest of the night."

Harry nodded and Hermione removed the spell.

"Zippopotamus? I thought spells were supposed to be in Latin?"

"Would you like another shot?"

"No. Hey, Ron?"

"What?"

Harry took his wand out.

"_Zippopotamus_! Woops! Oh, shit. Fix him, Hermione!"

Harry had zipped Ron's nose, and one of his eyes shut.

Hermione looked helpless.

"Always when I'm bloody eating!"

Snape put down his knife and fork, left the room, and came back with a small pot of foul smelling ointment.

He put a little on his fingers, and touched Ron's eye and his nose and muttered something in Old Elvish, so quickly that Hermione didn't pick it up.

"Cor! That was wicked! Can you teach it to us, too?" Ron asked.

Snape picked up his plate.

"I'll be eating in the bunker. Don't break anything." He announced.

After dinner, Hermione went down to Snape's lab in his bunker.

There, amid the familiar surroundings of a laboratory she felt it wouldn't be too painful to talk.

Snape had his nose in a book he wasn't reading, and Hermione started cleaning spotless glassware.

"What if I said I was sorry, and I didn't mean it? Because I am sorry, and I didn't mean it." She said.

"I'm sorry, too. I really had no idea I had enough of a heart left in my thick hide to be hurt as much as I have been this past year. I told meself a lot of pretty lies about why I done it, but it was revenge, pure and simple. I wanted you to feel the way I did. Now that I've made you, I wish I hadn't."

_Oh, lovely, Snape._

_ So romantic._

Snape began rummaging in his pockets and found a packet of Prince's Calming Tea.

"I'll put the kettle on." He said.

He made a pot of it for Hermione, over a Bunsen burner, a hurry.

He poured the tea, and started helping Hermione polish the glassware.

"It was just awful, you know. Harry took a year off after the War, and Ginny took a part time schedule, but not me. I just drove myself right on ahead. The way a crazy man beats a dying horse who won't run, anymore. Because, when things got too much for Harry he had his drugs and his drinking, and Ginny would go get in a fight and shag a bunch of blokes, and Ron would start with his End Of the World Crepe Hanging, but I didn't do any of that. When things get bad for me, I just go away. I'm not sure where it is I go, but I always go there. Somewhere deep inside myself, I expect. Where nothing and nobody can get to me, and nothing matters. Time doesn't even exist, in that place. It's terrible and wonderful at the same time, because I feel nothing, and nothing touches me, but, then again, I'm not in pain. And this past year, school was so hard, and all my memories of the War, it was all pushing on me, and I went away for a very long time. With what was left of my wits I wrote to you, because I figured you thought I just found another man at university, and you had no idea that I was, well, that I was going off me nut. I figured on you to drag me back into the real world. What I didn't figure on was the damage I'd done. I've scared myself, Sev. I went so far away, I almost didn't come back. I'm almost glad, though, that I'm feeling so miserable, right now. It's good to feel anything. Even how much I hurt, at this point. Can I have some more tea?"

Snape poured her another cup of tea.

"Do you think I have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder?" she asked.

"I think you have to quit putting all the shit in your life on a special shelf that keeps falling in on you. You scared your parents. And your friends. You scared the shit out of me. And Tom. He apparated to my office, immediately, and insisted I do something about you right away. There's two hard cases who don't scare easily."

"Well, I'm feeling better, now. I really am sorry, Sev. I used to think about you, all the time. I'd be up late, working or studying and think of how I would be back at Hogwarts, soon, and working with you. At night, before I went to sleep, I'd think about you, too. I had this fantasy that one night you'd come in and start yelling at me to get my act together and I'd tell you what was wrong, and then things would be alright. I mean, there was more to it than that, but, well, I was lying in bed at night. I'm sorry about the thing with Rog Davies, too. If it makes you feel any better, sometimes I'd call him Snape, but he was always too drunk to care."

Granger smiled, a little.

"You know, I think that's the only bad thing I've ever done?" she said, a little gleefully.

Snape poured her another cup of tea, and as they drank, they began putting the glassware away.

"I should have come sooner. I forget, sometimes, Granger, that you're so much younger than I am, and that there are so many things you just don't know. But I really am a mean, wicked man, and I thought if you had thrown me over, then the hell with you."

"What else were you supposed to think? I don't think you're wicked. Mean, sure. But never wicked."

The tea was done, the talk was over, and all of Snape's glassware was shockingly clean.

"What happens now?" Hermione asked.

"We go watch some telly. And, at nine, you go back to Hogwarts. You have finals to study for, and work to do."

"Maybe that's for the best." Hermione agreed.

_(Author's Note: Well, that's not the ringing declaration of true love that it could have been, was it? So, what happens now? Will Hermione get her groove back? And how long can Snape's good intentions last before the part of him that sticks out the furthest belies them. And speaking of which, wait a minute? What's Snape doing with Sibyl Trelawney? Hasn't he ANY standards. Well, Sibyl isn't all she seems. Ask Sirius. Interested? Check out "Only Skin Deep" under Books-Harry Potter-Sirius B. Rated M. Thanks for reading!)_


	3. 19th Nervous Breakdown

**Chapter Three: 19****th**** Nervous Breakdown**

**Prince's Potions, Wizarding Liverpool, 2000**

**I: Hermione**

Remus Lupin's counsellor, whom Albus had compelled her to go and see, at least once, had suggested that, during the time she studied for finals Hermione do something to get her mind off the upcoming tests.

He did not consider the hour or so she spent at Snape's watching telly with Ron and Harry enough.

Hermione thought the man was an idiot, but she had to visit him four times, to satisfy the conditions of her being allowed to commence her apprenticeship, following what she considered a minor hiccup in her mental health, and everyone else seemed to think of as a psychotic break with reality.

Hermione really didn't see why she needed psychological counselling, at all.

After this final, she'd be right as rain, after all.

So what if she had a panic attack, every night, at precisely three-thirty?

And if the most recent ones had been a bit more extreme, well that was because the most important event of her _whole entire life_ was on the horizon, and that fucking miserable old Scouser bastard Snape was in charge of it.

Mr. Hornswoggle, that was the wizard's name, of all things, he seemed quite concerned.

Especially after she admitted to him that for the last month all she had eaten was chicken soup, yogurt, bananas, rice and turkey sandwiches, which was not bad in and of itself, but, coupled with the fact that during her last panic attack her whole body had gone numb and her heart was pounding so fast that in the morning when she woke up all her muscles were stiff and sore and her chest ached, he was quite upset.

He was quite upset?

He wasn't the one who thought he was having a heart attack at 21, and he didn't have to suffer the embarrassment of being rushed to St. Mungo's by Albus Dumbledore and then diagnosed with anxiety.

Hornswoggle's came to see her at St. Mungo's, where she was being kept overnight for observation, and he expressed the opinion that Hermione already knew everything she might need to know, and for the sake of her health and her sanity, she should get out of her room and away from her books and the Hogwarts labs, indeed, away from Hogwarts, altogether.

Hermione took his advice, and went home to Liverpool, to her concerned parents.

Out of her room, away from her books, and into the lab at Prince's Potions.

However, Severus Prince trumped her attempt to continue to obsess over the final, and sent her upstairs to man the counter and take care of customers, with Snape's mother, Eileen, keeping an eye on her.

Hermione, however, was not the type to work in retail, so Eileen sent her to the stockroom, where she was given the task to supervise the stockboys.

The stockboys turned out to be aa familiar duo she hadn't seen for a few years.

Vince Crabbe and Greg Goyle.

When she got to the stockroom, on the day before the dreaded event, they were both sitting around a packing crate, wearing smart overalls that had their names printed on one breast pocket and "Prince's Potions" on the other, along with matching flat caps.

They were having tea.

She had to admit, it was probably the best possible job for both of them.

It didn't take a lot of brains, they wore the same thing every day, it gave them the opportunity to get a lot of exercise, and either their former housemaster or a member of his family was around to keep an eye on them at all times.

"'Ermione! I heard you went urf your nut! Wotchu doin' ere?" Crabbe asked.

"Just helping out around the shop. I'm supposed to supervise you two."

"Oh. Well this is out tea-break. Union says so. Do we call you Ms. Granger, then?" Goyle replied.

"No, Hermione's fine. Let's see, here. According to this manifest, you're to unload six barrels of dragon's blood in tincture of wolfsbane after tea, and then you're to re-arrange the herb stock so the boxes expiring first are in the front. I suppose I'm just supposed to sit at this desk and watch you."

"Yeah. That's wot supervisors do."

Hermione sat at the desk, with a large ledger in front of her.

She worked out all the maths quite quickly, and opened the desk.

There was a magazine inside it, a copy of _Gay Grimoire_ that was probably Goyle's.

Hermione stuck it inside the ledger.

One thing about these gay boys magazines, they always featured really good looking blokes in unbelievable states of arousal.

And since Snape was still having some kind of snit, she wasn't getting any.

She was thinking, in the back of her mind, about what the hell it was Snape could possibly have cooked up for tomorrow.

Then, she began to get engrossed in the dirty magazine.

Nothing like sex to get your mind off of everything else, especially when you're really feeling randy.

"…Ermione?"

Hermione realised Goyle was standing right behind her, and she closed the ledger with a bang.

"WHAT?"

He chuckled.

"Old Snape cut yer off, 'eh? Draco's like that. Has his snits. With me an' Pansy. We figure, bollocks, you'll not get the best of me. Me, I just crawl under the desk. What's 'e gonna do? Ask me to stop?"

"Erm, yes. Good point. Well, look at the clock! I see it's quitting time. Here's your magazine back. Erm…sorry."

"Naw, you keep it. Take yer mind urf your troubles."

She inspected their work, and got a cheerful goodbye, and with the magazine Goyle had so generously given her, went back to her house.

Hermione and the skin mag were having a lovely evening when there came a heavy and insistent pounding on her door.

"WHAT?" she cried.

The magazine flew from her hands, she shoved it under her mattress, and then straightened out her clothes and squirted a whole bunch of that hand sanitizer stuff her mother had gallon jugs of everywhere into her hands, and cleaned herself up.

"I'll be right there!"

Her caller, however, was so rude as to just let himself in.

And Hermione had told her mother and father and even Winky that the last person she wanted to see the night before her final was Severus Tobias Snape.

"Granger, I want you to spend the night at my house." He insisted.

Hermione didn't appreciate his manner.

"Look, Snape, right now, I'm not your student, I'm not your apprentice, and depending on how your suddenly tender feelings are resting, I'm not your bird, either. That gives you absolutely zero say on where I go or what I do, so fuck off."

"Look, Granger, I have already accepted you as me apprentice, and you'll quit being my bird when I tell you that you have and not before it! Furthermore, I fucking well know you, don't I? You'll spend half the night worrying, forget to eat, and end up at that lab table at three in the morning so exhausted you'll blow something up and have to spend the rest of the night cleaning up. Couldn't you just , oh, for once not give me your usual GBH on the ears and say yes?"

"Fuck off." Hermione reiterated.

"I'll sack you!"

"Without cause? I'd like to see you try it!"

"What do you want me to do, Granger? Ask nicely? Beg? Speak with a posh accent? You're more fucking trouble than you're worth!"

"If I have to tell you what I want you to do, then you are getting old." Hermione sniffed.

Snape narrowed his eyes at her and sneered, his gold teeth glinting piratically in the soft light of the candelabra chandeliers.

Hermione considered a quick _divesto_, and then taking Goyle's advice.

But, them Snape delivered his next shot across the bow.

"Oh, right. It's about your IPD, then."

"My what? What's IPD?"

"Itchy Pussy Disease! That's your problem, Granger. If you're not so far into your own head that you've got it stuffed right up your arse, then you're being led around by your pussy. You'd think someone with a brain like yours would be a bit smarter, but not you!"

For a moment, Hermione was gobsmacked by the sheer hypocrisy of Snape's words.

Then, she locked the door, warded it, cast a quick Silencing Spell, and commenced to howl in outrage.

"Me! You manky old Scouser git! You fucking hypocrite! You first got your greens before you came to Hogwarts first year,, and you've devoted much of the rest of your misspent life too keeping your big neb right in it! You're a fucking Third Degree Sex Magus, and you personally founded a cabal for the sole purpose of getting high and shagging! Sure, maybe the lot of you 70's burnouts don't get high anymore, but when's the last time you missed an Order of the Satyr meeting? An' you could 'ardly 'elp being led around by your cock, could you? I mean, it's a wonder you don't pass out when you get it up; there's no blood in your brain, then, for sure, so I know what you're thinking with! You've got a lot of fucking nerve, Snape!"

"Being a Sex Magus is a time-honoured and complicated discipline, concerned with the most elemental and powerful kinds of magickal forces." Snape protested, with as much dignity as he could muster.

"Yeah. And I suppose so is rumping Narcissa Malfoy or Sibyl Trelawney with a preposterous pair of horns and a silly mask on with Led Zeppelin records on in the background, while Remus Lupin talks to Luke Mlafoy about the Good Old Days whilst Malfoy's shagging whichever of said two witches that you haven't got your dick in and Arabella Baxter gives Loony Moony a blowjob! Oh, right, I'm sure that's all quite powerfully fucking elemental! You fucking tosser! You bleedin' hypocrite! What kind of a fool d'you take me for? Now, listen, you! This is how it's going to be, Sev. If you want me to come play housie-housie with you, so you can see I'm all tucked up snuggy-warm in beddie-bye the night before the unspeakably fucking torturous litany of despair of a final I'm sure you've dreamed up for me, then you're going to have to come across, aren't you? And you had better make it elemental and powerful, by the gods, because I'm not prepared on a night like this to accept disappointment!"

"You've put a lot of thought into what goes on at Order of the Satyr meetings, haven't you, Granger?"

"Why not? Since you've all the sudden developed tender feelings, thinking is all I've been able to do!"

Snape's face broke into a wry smile.

"Granger, you are cold, calculating, cruel, insulting, disrespectful, snarky and obsessed with shagging. You're a right nasty little piece of work. You really should have been in Slytherin."

"There's only one snake I'm interested in, Snape, and you've got it right here."

From the look on his face, Hermione could see that Snape didn't believe she had just upped and grabbed hold of the ol' cobra right in her parents house, but then again, Hermione couldn't believe she had, either.

"Granger! For fuck's sake, leave it out! You'll get to keep it in a box, forever, if your father catches me using it on you, He'll chop it off and eve me bleed to death on the landing!" Snape protested.

Hermione let him go, but it was far too late.

"Uh-oh. The snake's awake." Hermione laughed.

Good for the old tosser, let him be embarrassed.

Snape untucked his shirt, and started pulling it down.

"That's not going to work. Try thinking of something disgusting."

He gave her one of his angriest looks, and Hermione came very close to slamming him against the door, unzipping his flies and going down faster than the Titanic.

"Go downstairs and get me coat. Then we'll go."

"Are we agreed?"

Snape thought about what he had in mind for the final, or at least that's what Hermione assumed he was thinking of, due to the diabolical way he grinned.

"We're agreed."

**Snape's House, West Darby, Liverpool. Just About Midnight. **

Hermione struggled for breath the way a drowning woman would, what breaths she had coming in pants and explosive gasps.

_Be careful what you wish for, Hermione, because, fuck, are you getting it._

_ The hard way._

Her arms and her legs almost ached from holding Sev so tight against her; but she was so far from anything resembling pain that someone could have hit her with a board and she wouldn't have felt it.

The sheets were twisted, they were soaked with sweat; they had sweated straight through to the mattress, and Sev's breath was coming in harsh gasps in time with his rhythm, with their rhythm as they moved together, in furious and fluid motion.

Propulsive.

Beads of sweat in fat drops rolled from the tendrils of Snape's hair and dropped onto Hermoine's face and her chest, a few onto her lips, warm and salty.

Her eyes flew open because she couldn't keep them closed, and there was a sound, a rattling, pounding sound, it was Snape, beating his fist against the wall.

Something was about to overtake her.

It was, of course something like an orgasm, but it was nothing like one, on the other hand, and it very well could have been either unconsciousness or death.

She started to cry out for him.

"Sev! Sev!"

Snape pulled her up off the mattress and clasped her against his thin, broad-shouldered, wiry chest; she could feel his heart hammering against her breastbone, writhing against the mat of hair and tattoos on his chest.

"Hermione!" he gasped.

She opened her eyes, again, and the horns were there.

That was when the approaching something arrived, and Hermione cried out.

It wasn't death, it was indeed an orgasm, but they were going to have to invent another word for it, because that little word and the short but happy moment of pleasure it denoted was nothing compared to the wave, the force, the emotion that was breaking over Hermione.

This was what the atom felt like as it was being split; this was the moment of nuclear annihilation; the joy of Armageddon.

No, that was too nihilistic.

What was it she had once thought?

A great golden copulation; like the one that had happened at the beginning of time.

Slowly, Hermione slid through time and space and a thousand millennia later she was lying on her back on the disordered bed, and Sev was lying beside her.

"Sev, what the…"

"Don't say anything, Hermione. Go to sleep."

**Hogwarts School of Wirchcraft and Wizardry, Snape's Dungeon Lab, the next day.**

**I: Hermione**

The night before, Hermione slept like a dead person, and all morning the rosy glow of the absolute best lay she'd ever had clung to her.

Now, however, with her Merlin School apprentice candidate's robes on, in Snape's lab, panic had set in, and was crawling around in her guts and her belly like an ever-dividing virus.

They were alone, completely alone, and Hermione rubbed her sweaty palms on her still faintly mouldy-smelling robe as Snape locked and warded the doors using a spell in Old Elvish that she didn't know.

"Are you ready, Granger?' she asked.

"I'm ready. Snape." She replied.

Cooly, Snape reached into the pockets of his robe, and pulled out a small leather pouch.

He unfastened the tie around it, put it to his lips, and drank the contents.

The empty pouch sat in his hand.

"Incendio." He said, and with a bright flash of blue flame, it burnt to a pile of ashes that he blew into the air to disperse.

Then, to Hermione's great horror, his black eyes became narrow points of panic, and bulged out of his head as he clutched at his chest and fell to his knees.

"Snape!"

Hermione rushed to catch him.

"Granger…I have just poisoned meself…you have three hours to save my life. Begin."

Snape convulsed, managed a grin, and slipped into unconsciouness.

A viscous green liquid began to drain from his mouth, eyes and nostrils, his body convulsed, and then he was quite still.

_So_, she thought, that explains last night; _the old boy knew there was a chance he was having his last shag, so he wanted to make it a good one._

_ Well, if he lives through this, I'll show him, I'll fuck his IQ ten points lower, I'll screw so far into next week that he'll end up in last month. _

Following these completely irrational thoughts, the first thing Hermione did was to lower Snape gently to the ground, and then proceed to completely shit herself.

For a moment, as she rushed to the door and began pounding on it and screaming, her heart smashing brutally against her ribs, Hermione very nearly shit herself, literally.

She screamed for help, and for Dumbledore, and for Great Thor and Mother Danu and Father Zeus and Gentle Jesus and God, God, God and just about anyone else who came to mind before she realised that there was going to be no help, and if she wanted to ever see Snape alive again, let alone graduate from the Merlin School or become Snape's Apprentice, it was all up to her.

She picked up a quill and a piece of parchment.

"Right. Well, no point in going through all this shit. Now, the old tosser he burnt up the vial, so I can't analyse it. I'll just have to make some observations. That's all. Now. Subject is a white male, forty years of age. Long history of drug and alcohol abuse, ending when subject was in his early twenties. He is approximately six feet and one inch tall, weighs about. 12 stone. Subject has exuded greenish mucous from most of his orifices…let me check… all of his orifices. Poisoning was accompanied by classic shock symptoms, chest pain, shortness of breath, and heart palpitations. Also mild seizure. It has been about….five minutes since poisoning. Subject's respiration is shallow, pulse is sluggish. Greenish mucus has stopped, but subject has swelled up, considerably and has turned black."

Having made her observations, Hermione got several vials from the lab table, and a box of cotton swabs.

She took samples of the green muck from all the places it had come out of, and skin samples from four places, and also a swab from Snape's tongue.

She went into his former bedroom, got a pillow, and put it under his head, then went to work, talking to herself as she worked, in case Snape had a recording spell of device in use.

"I will be running the usual procedure on each of the samples using the Elementals Test. I will begin with combing each of the thirteen samples of poisoned skin and mucus, and the saliva sample subject with all the traditional alchemical reagents antimony, arsenic, copper, gold, iron, lead, magnesium, phosphorus, platinum, silver, sulphur, tin, and zinc, in separate vials."

It took Hermione the better part of an hour to arrange 168 reagent experiments, which, she noted, just in case, was also Snape's body weight, 168 pounds.

She checked on Snape.

His condition was unchanged.

"Now I will subject each reagent experiment to the four elements. I will use dragon's blood and a butane flame for Fire, riverwater from the muddy Mersey for Water, soil from Stonehenge for Earth, and for Air, when necessary, I'll take a deep breath and blow."

Another hour passed as Hermione completed the tests, and carefully examined the results of 168 vials.

Chewing her lower lip, Hermione began to write, and speak.

"Now we are getting somewhere. The only tests that were conclusive were the green mucus with Fire and copper, as well as Earth and platinum and the black skin samples with gold and Water and lead and air. Now, according to Caglilostro's First Law, the correspondence of Earth, Water, Air and Fire in these proportions with the metals copper, platinum gold and lead are a signatory of Old Elvish magic. On further examination of the separated elements of the green mucus, I have detected the presence of mithril, or, as it is known in modern times, adamantium. In its solid form, adamantium is the world's strongest metal, but it is very rarely used, because it is highly unstable and toxic in its liquid form. It is useful as an alloy only with platinum or titanium, which the Elves made use of in the past and still do to make their adamantium-alloy weapons, which are also known as mithril. Due to this analysis, I can say with almost absolute certainty that Professor Snape has ingested a vial of pure liquid adamantium. He is suffering from mithrilliasis, which will become fatal in one hour. There is no known cure."

Hermione chewed on the end of the quill.

Then it hit her.

The long shot.

She quit writing, quit trying to keep the lab looking neat.

She had three mithril mixing cauldrons bubbling at once.

In one was melting platinum.

In the other were athelas leaves in a solution of wolfsbane and orange oil.

In the third, and most foul smelling was a piece of the skin of Nagini boiling in the snake's hot and liquefying fat, with a pinch of bitter green wormwood rapidly dissolving.

As each small cauldron reached their boiling points, Hermione combined them in one large cauldron, and mixed, repeating over and over again the same spell that Snape used with his Elvish ointments to erase the wounds of sectumsempra, and to erase the marks of particularly nasty hexes that his students in Slythern house sometimes threw at each other.

She stirred and stirred until she ended with a pot full of a thick greenish paste that smelled of wormwood and oranges.

Hermione hefted the cauldron off the table, took a little of the paste and brought it to a boil.

Once it liquefied, she put it into a syringe and injected it into the crook of Snape's arm, right in the scar left by his years of drug abuse.

The swelling left his body, and his skin resumed its normal color.

Then, she quickly undressed him, and all the while saying the spell, she rubbed every bit of the ointment all over him, from head to foot, leaving no part of his body uncovered.

She even rubbed it in his hair, from root to tip.

Snape opened his eyes.

And not while she was rubbing the ointment into his hair, either.

"Good. You figured it out." He said.

"I hate you, you fucking old tosser!" Hermione told him.

She didn't however, hate him enough to let go of what she had hold of.

"Granger, the recording spell is still in effect."

"Is it? Well, then what you are going to submit to the Merlin School's board of regents is about to get very fucking interesting."

For, as Snape had returned to the land of the living, just as it did when he awoke from a long sleep, that part of the body which Harry referred to as "the Firebolt" and Snape was prone to call "the Cobra" also awaoke, happy to greet this bright new moment of rejuvenation, especially considering the familiar ministrations of a pair of hands the snake knew very well.

Moving aside her ceremonial robes and her less than ceremonial cotton knickers, Hermione, as they say in the Quidditch locker rooms, hopped on the broomstick.

Snape gasped.

So did Hermione.

"Shut your gob, you! Lie back and take it like a man, you asked for it."

"Can I say one more thing?"

"Go ahead."

The Potions Master took a deep breath in his regenerated lungs.

"_**DIVESTO!**_"

**Albus Dumbledore's Office. Evening**

**II: Snape**

"Remarkable. Completely remarkable. Let me get this right. You poisoned yourself with pure liquid mithril, and Miss Granger recreated your family's secret restorative ointment, purely through her work in these three hours, and restored you to full health."

"Yes. By my standards, then, she passed the test. I would show you with sound, Balthazar, but that would reveal the family secret. And that is something that the Princes only divulge to apprentices, children, husbands and wives. You understand." Snape explained.

"Yes, quite. Well, We'll be glad to have Hermione walk with her class at the matriculation ceremonies on May Day. As Valedictorian. Giving the valedictory speech, you know."

"Certainly, Balthazar. Well, Severus and I have an apprenticeship ceremony to plan, so if you will excuse us?"

"Of course, Albus. I have to be getting back to the school, anyway."

Balthazar McTeague, Headmaster of the Merlin School left Albus Dumbledore's office to make his way to the public apparition point and return to his school.

Leaving Albus Dumbledore and Severus Snape alone in the Headmaster's office.

"Severus, I have to ask you, did you have some kind of back-up plan, in case Hermione failed to pass your test?"

"I didn't need one. I found out during the Second Wizarding War that I could trust Granger with me life. I was right, wasn't I? I had four hours to live, I gave Granger three, and she finished the job in two and a half hours." Snape proudly reported.

Albus didn't know whether to laugh, or cry, or scream at his foster son.

"You do realise you're mad!"

"Well…the door would have opened in three hours, and Hermione would have run screaming for help, and you and I both know that It would have taken me another half hour to suffer permanent damage, and up to another hour to actually die."

"Severus, you could have died at any time."

"Well, I didn't, Albus, now did I?"

Dumbledore sighed.

If Severus had anything else up his sleeve, he wasn't telling.

"How did Hermione do it?"

Snape re-activated the Thought Box

"Deductive reasoning. Experience. And taking a shot in the dark. Watch this part. She realised that the ointment is the cure, not the spell. As you know, the spell is just the Old Elvish translation of the ingredients, but spelt backwards. And there she is writing the words down. And now she's starting to make the ointment."

They watched through again until Hermione began undressing Snape so that she could revive him, and then the transmission abruptly cut off.

Albus blue eyes twinkled devilishly over his glasses at his son by law and magical bond.

"Well, Severus, that Thought Box transmission terminated rather abruptly, didn't it?" he said.

"Yes, it did. And if Granger ever really gets me pissed off, I'll send the excised portion off to the Tattler and the Daily Prophet." Snape chuckled.

He returned to his lap to find Treacher and Kreacher cleaning up the floor, and Harry cleaning the cauldrons and vials.

The place was a mess.

There were pools of green goo, and congealed ointments and gods only knew what else all over the floor, mucked in with ripped pieces of clothes, and the whole lab looked like a bomb had hit it, and was in disarray, with crusty cauldrons and goo and dirt and burnt up, soggy or filthy bits of potions and reagents everywhere.

The House Elves hard at work didn't dismay Snape, but since when did his son become Helpful Harry?

The Potions Master was immediately suspicious.

"Alright, Harry, what's the job? Did you and A Clockwork Weasley break your waterbed, again, and flood the whole house?"

"No job, Da. I mean, you've had a big day, and so has Hermione, so Kreacher and Treacher and I decided to tidy up the place for you. I mean, I was worried stupid about you all day. You might have died, you know. So, how was it?"

"Unbelivably painful and horrible. But I was unconscious very quickly."

"When did you come to?"

"While Granger was rubbing the restorative ointment on the ol' King Cobra. Don't worry about me, Harry."

Harry laughed, and he and Snape shared some conspiratorial nods, winks, nudges and obscene hand-gestures.

"That would have woke me up, alright. But how did the ointment get all over the floor?"

"Ask your crazy little mate, Granger. You know, I think what she did to me may actually constitute some kind of fucking crime."

"Bollocks, Da. You can't rape the willing."

"See. I told you that was some of what we was cleaning up." Treacher told Kreacher.

"Kreacher knows. You forget little brother, I work for the son. The apple has not fallen far from the tree. Very difficult, the laundry."

"Yes. Quite." Treacher agreed.

"I suppose I can trust you lot to clean up me lab. Mind you, if there's one thing out of place in the morning, I'll be putting me boot up all your arses. Now, if you'll excuse me. I'm knackered. I've a bed to catch."

Having had such a big day, Snape didn't bother walking to Hermione's cosy tower, he apparated there, and didn't care a monkey's if his action was illegal.

Hermione was tucked up in her bed, asleep, and after taking the third of three long, hot showers that day, Snape gratefully slid between the green and black sheets, happily finding the familiar comfort of nestling against Hermione Granger's nice warm bum.

"Snape?" she said, sleepily.

"I 'ope you weren't expecting anyone else."

"I wasn't."

She was about to roll over but he stopped her.

"Stay where you are, Granger. All I could think of when I swallowed that poison was that I'd be sleeping snug and safe curled up against your nice warm arse by night-time, so leave it right where it is."

"Did you have a back-up plan, Snape?"

"No."

"So you risked your life, for no reason?"

"No, Granger. I showed you that I trusted you enough to become my Apprentice by placing my life in your hands. And I devised the only test difficult enough for you to really demonstrate what your skills are. Beisdes, you know me. I am a wicked old screw. D'you think I would have risked my life if I wasn't sure you'd be able to pass my test?"

"You're mad, Snape. Completely over the fucking moon. You know, you almost killed me, fucking giving me a turn like that! Still, I expect we should be square, now. I mean, things ought to be alright between us, if you can put your life in me hands."

"Well, I suppose they are. But I'm still like as not going to be a real berk the next six months."

"You're always a real berk, Snape."

Snape was almost asleep when Granger spoke to him, again.

"Yunno, I don't know what it is I can't get me mind around. That you quite literally trust me with your life, or that I managed to pass that test. What if I hadn't? What would I have done if you'd died?"

"I wasn't going to die, Granger. It takes about four and a half hours for mithrilosis to do permanent damage, and five for it to kill you. If the door opened in three, that would have been plenty of time for you to run screaming to Albus, and for him to send for me Mum or me grandfather, and they would have brought the ointment."

"But, Snape, mitrillosis can be fatal within five minutes just as much as in five hours."

"What, after I've been fucking about with mithril cauldrons and Old Elvish potions that always have tincture of mithril in them? Kill me that quick? I knew it wasn't bloody likely."

"It was still a crazy, stupid thing to do. What if I'd failed? Then what?"

"I was going to poison you with something that would take three hours to kill you, and have you figure that out."

"I wish you would have. Better me than you, Snape. It was me own final, wasn't it."

Snape was rather surprised that the idea didn't seem to bother her, but he was too tired for further conversation.

Of course, a few minutes after he fell asleep, it struck Hermione that he expected her to risk death itself just to be his fucking apprentice, and she became furious, but she decided to let the old tosser sleep.

After all, they were going to have the next two years to bicker, fight, disagree and argue, and he had, in a way, almost killed himself on her account, today, so Hermione let it go.

For now.


End file.
